Energy Department Selects 27 Innovators for Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program

Cyclotron Road at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, is welcoming 12 new fellows:

• Luis Valencia (Dale City, California) and Jacob Roberts (Dale City, California): Engineers Biosorbents That Extract Critical Minerals from Abundant Industrial Waste Streams
   
• Jessica Frick* (Palo Alto, California) and Jiya Janowitz* (Palo Alto, California): Manufactures Ultra-High-Quality Semiconductors That Cannot Be Made on Earth to Serve Advanced Applications Bottlenecked by Crystal Quality
   
• Albert Kumar* (Palo Alto, California): Building the Next-Generation Silicon Carbide RF Semiconductor Chips Powering 5G and 6G Cellular Infrastructure
   
• Nina Cochran Warner* (Redwood City, CA) and Menandro Cruz* (Redwood City, California): Using Biomimetic Surface Science to Unlock a New Category of Safe, High-Performing Permanent Hair Dye
   
• Milad Yavari (Menlo Park, California) and Joe Sawa (Menlo Park, California): A Breakthrough Membrane That Operates in Harsh Conditions Turning Wasted Hydrogen into a Valuable Resource and Making It More Affordable
   
• Yasmeen AlFaraj (Cambridge, Massachusetts): Enables the Reprocessing of Historically Unrecyclable Thermosets and the Recovery of Valuable Composite Materials for Reuse
   
• Pankaj Ghildiyal (Riverside, California): Produces Plasma-Created Silicon That Replaces Graphite, Boosts Capacity, Lowers Cost, and Seamlessly Integrates into Existing Battery Production Lines
   
• Bonnie Maven* (San Carlos, California): Helping Farmers Break the Rules of Genetics—without Gene Editing.

*Fellow was selected and funded through Activate.

Innovation Crossroads at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is welcoming six new fellows:

• Lance Adler** (Gulfport, Florida): Wildfire Prevention for Power Companies
   
• Alex Readel (Knoxville, Tennessee): Innovative Hexagonal Boron Nitride Coatings for Harsh Environment Applications
   
• Evan Stacy (Hattiesburg, Mississippi): Aqueous Photoiniferter Polymerization of Acrylonitrile-Based Polymers to Enhance Carbon Fiber Production
   
• Brian Washington** (Powell, Tennessee): Aluminum-Air Technology Powering the Future
   
• Helen Banner: Sustainable Algae-Based Biomaterial Composites
   
• Viktor Zenkov (Knoxville, Tennessee): Enhancing Energy Efficiency in Data Center Cooling Systems.

**Fellow was co-funded by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Chain Reaction Innovations at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, is welcoming five new fellows:

• Nathan Arnold (Urbana, Illinois): Room-Temperature, Free Space Photonic Quantum Memory
   
• Ryan Cardiff (Seattle, Washington): Bioproduction of Valuable Chemicals from Carbon Waste Using Engineered Bacteria
   
• Brandon Grinkemeyer (Somerville, Massachusetts): Photonic Interconnects for Scalable Quantum Computing
   
• Kyle Matthews (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania): Quality MXenes at Scale for Energy and Defense
   
• Moha Shahjamali (Pleasanton, California): Low-Temperature Pyrolysis Technology to Produce Value-Added Carbon Materials.

West Gate at National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, is welcoming four new fellows:

• Ian Brownstein (Denver, Colorado): Reducing the Cost of Distributed Wind Energy With Efficient and Low-Cost Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines
   
• James Clegern (Loveland, Colorado): Advancing Non-Chemical Battery Storage for Longer Lasting, High-Performance Batteries
   
• Kian Lopez (Boulder, Colorado): Pressure-Driven Membrane Systems Producing Ultrapure Water for Advanced Manufacturing and Water Treatment Applications 
   
• Ying Sun (San Diego, California): Addressing the Demand for Rare-Earth Elements Through Phytomining, a Technique That Uses Engineered Plants to Extract Rare-Earth Elements from Soil.